Saturday, January 17, 2015

Can the world's "ship" change course in time to avert disaster?

We have all heard the aphorism, “The definition of
insanity is to continue doing the same thing while expecting different results.”
of President Obama referred to a similar truth when he opened dialogue with
Cuba, after 50 years of blockade, trade embargo and prohibition of United
States tourism to Cuba, expecting either to break the Castro regime or return
Cuba to diplomatic relations with the U.S.

Just yesterday, through the CBC National News, we
learned that repeated flu shots in successive years results, paradoxically, in
reduced immunity to the very “bugs” those shots are designed to impede. One of
the lines in the CBC story ran something like this: “Here is a medical paradox.”
It seems to us that there are other examples of paradoxes in our current
situation that would demonstrate our collective clinging to “old habits” while
simultaneously seeking different results or outcomes.

For starters, we have all witnessed the outpouring
of political unity and solidarity in Paris, immediately following the Charlie
Hebdo massacre and the Kosher Market hostage taking. The world’s television news
cameras came together in Paris to demonstrate a united front, partly in
sympathy with the victims of these acts of terror. Politicians of all stripes
are addicted to venues where cameras can and will portray them in a favourable
light. Their very survival in their political roles depends on their sustaining
public confidence, respect and trust among their respective populations. On
Sunday, January 11, 2015, some fifty world leaders grasped a common shared
opportunity to march through the streets of Paris, in a show of strength (and
personal courage) to inspire a common front against radical Islamic terrorism.

Whether radical Islamic terrorism is an ideology of
religious bigotry exclusively is a matter of considerable debate. Some argue
that the roots of these terrorism cells are poverty, dispossession, lack of
access to education, alienation and a lack of access to economic independence, and
political misadventures based on some the convergence of some old habits among
leaders with a new emergence of terrorists opening the windows of their “tents”
and screaming, “We will not put up with this any longer!”

What are the things they are saying they will no
longer put up with?

Start with a global economy dominated by the
corporations whose interests are exclusively the wanton production of profits
for shareholders, using whatever strategies and tactics that permit them to maximize
those profits, regardless of the impact their actions and attitudes have on the
people working for them or the people living in their orbits. Imposing a savage
capitalism on a highly differentiated and obviously “unequal” plethora of
demographics, without concern for the pace and the ravages such capitalism has
and will continue to wreak is one way in which we are all implicit in doing the
same thing while expecting different results. Western capitalism cares for
immediate profit, and in its largest forms, corporations devour their own kind,
in a race to dominance in their respective sectors.

Yes, to be sure, there are pockets of “social
entrepreneurs” whose business models are dedicated to ameliorating social
blight, like the housing depletion in cities like Detroit through the application
of free market discipline. Micro loans, as one of the central instruments of
social entrepreneurialism in the third world, are considered a model for the
restoration of regions in the first world where capitalism has left is trail of
devastation, as it certainly has in Detroit. However, social
entrepreneurialism, based as it in on a stream of individual entrepreneurs,
will not provide the social and economic and industrial and educational
infrastructure in countries like Nigeria, where Boko Haram runs rampant.
Admirable as it is, social entrepreneurialism, is like putting a band-aid on a
massive and metastasized cancerous tumour. It may slow the spread of the
disease, but it will not stop it.

However, there are other “old habits” besides their
addiction to their own media dependence that plague the current generation of
political leaders. We hear this week from President Obama and Prime Minister
Cameron of Great Britain, that they share a common belief in and commitment to
a variety of strategies toaddress the
problem of radical terror. Good words, and admirable attitudes, even insightful
diagnosis, to be sure. Nevertheless, these “visionary” leaders are still
inextricably trapped in a military, industrial, pharmaceutical, corporatism
vortex so complicated and so deeply embedded both in the public infrastructure
as well as in the mind-set of their respective “publics” that hard-powered
intervention of all kinds, including flu shots that defeat their very purpose.,
token philanthropy as a primary means of addressing poverty without the
dedication of massive public resources that are really needed, along with the
accentuated gap between rich and poor in their own countries, as well as most
other western, “developed” countries, and
overt, over-powering “know-best” solutions like drones, a massive intelligence
overbuild, a reversion to airstrikes and military training and mentoring, as
the primary responses to terror, like those flu shots, have proven their own
futility and even counter-productivity.

Since 2001, and 9/11, when this “current cadre of
terrorists” were concentrated in one country, we have watched them grow, morph
and continue to adapt and adopt, and are now operating in somewhere between 30
and 40 countries, and their reach continues to grow. Furthermore, they are now
the recipients (unwittingly) of American weaponry much of it left behind in
Iraq and in Afghanistan, weaponry that is readily and frequently being used by
the terrorists against all enemies including western forces seeking to “eradicate”
terror from the globe. Nearly a decade and a half of repetition of armed
conflict with the Islamic terrorists, including the addition of the latest
intelligence hardware and software not only have not proven successful, except
perhaps in micro-venues, only driving the terrorists underground to evade the
scan of intelligence and also the rain of bombs and missiles. Political
discussion in most western countries continues along the lines of “increasing
police and military empowerment” to deal with the threat, along with enhanced
military measures, albeit jointly deployed by more than a single country, and
the language of the debate is now ramped up to President Holland’s “war” on
terror.

We are becoming entrapped in our own rhetoric! We
are fulfilling Pogo’s insightful diagnosis: “We have met the enemy and he is
us!”

Is it just possible, for those determined to find a
silver lining in these years of savage murders, beheadings, kidnapping and
selling of young girls, wanton destruction of whole communities (Baka, Nigeria,
for starters) and assassinations, that those privileged to have acquired a full
and legitimate education, a full access to health care and employment with
dignity, as well as access to the largest and latest quantity of consumer “toys”
the world have ever produced (the political class of all western countries) can
and will see the blindness and the hubris of their collective addiction to “inside
the box” thinking, strategies, traditions and conventional expectations and
make a radical shift to searching and finding unconventional and creative and
non-violent strategies that will of course be seen as “weak” and
counter-intuitive, by most who seek revenge and pay-back.

It is precisely revenge, and pay-back and alienation
that are motivating the terrorists. Piling on to enflame and enrage that
alienation will inevitably bring the terrorists more and more recruits and more
and more creative acts of vengeance, and all locales are targets for their
vengeance. Just like the microbes that have mutated into bugs that are immune
to the latest vaccination, the terrorists have and will continue to mutate, as
well as recruit, to develop an immunity to the power attacks that can and will
be inflicted by the “developed” nations. And while every pharmaceutical
corporation in the world has a lab and laboratory staff dedicated to the 24-7-365
pursuit of a vaccine that addresses all potential microbes, including those we
have not met yet, so too will all western governments act in parallel to those
laboratories, to counter the terrorist movement. And in another two or three
decades, we will still be having these conversations, still ineffectually
addressing those issues that are providing the “green-houses” where terrorism
and terrorists are conceived, gestated and birthed, in their increasingly
monstrous models.

There is still not a universal commitment from all
nations to the processes and the ideals of the United Nations.

There is still no sign-on from the United States to
the International Criminal Court, even though the Secretary of State this week
called the actions of Boko Haram “criminal acts” which could thereby be brought
before the ICC.

There is still no international agreement to address
the perils of global warming and climate change, in spite of the mountains of
credible and reliable evidence of human production of toxins that are already
raising the sea levels in cities like Miami where they are installing pumps at
considerable cost to alleviate the problem.

There is still no international recognition that
imprisonment, especially the imprisonment of minorities including in Canada,
First Nations men, in the U.S. blacks and Latino’s, and in France, Muslim men,
leads only to backlash that is legitimate given the disproportionate and racist
imprisonment of those very men, already marginalized even before incarceration.

There is still no international acceptance of a
young girl’s “RIGHT” to a quality education and to the pursuit of a
professional career that is commensurate with that education.

There is still no international agreement that the
ravages of global corporatism have wrought serious negative prices in many
countries, depriving millions of access to the “benefits” of wealth.

There is still no international agreement that “we
are our brother’s keeper” a cornerstone of all faith communities, in their most
healthy incarnations.

There is still no international agreement that all
humans deserve access to clean water, clean air and land free of pollutants, as
well as access to work with dignity.

There is so much work to do, that it will take
centuries to reverse the current path of the planet’s largest “ship” the globe,
and there will be decades through which we will continue to question whether we
have built into the hard-wiring the very capacity to change course in time to
meet the changing challenges of today and tomorrow.

And we will all know that we could see the danger
signals on the horizon in the early years of the twenty-first century.